


The Law

by Terra



Category: Daredevil (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Historical AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 14:01:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Terra/pseuds/Terra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daredevil.  Revolutionary America historical AU.  I don't even know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Law

He was born in Maryland, and a papist sure enough, but the tides of Men draw him north. At King's College he reads law, as his father would have wanted, and on the green outside he listens to the city. There are always men and boys reading loudly from the newspapers, asking how best to secure one's happiness and perpetuate one's liberties. Matthew listens, often writing things down. The Law is large, cavernous; he struggles sometimes to fit it all in.

One night the rebels come for President Cooper, declaring their intent of slitting his ears and stripping him down to bare. Their torches are like tiny suns, the center of their own rational universe. Matthew hears them banging up the college steps, and runs to protect Cooper, showing him out the back way to a ship bound for England. There is such a look of cowardice on the old man's countenance that it troubles him down to his entrails. He knows then that he is no loyalist, that the Law is bigger than King George and the rebels both. To his mind it spreads from every nerve in every body like invisible sunbeams, connecting all that the Creator had wrought.

The next morning he writes a short pamphlet: _A Refutation of the Principles recently expressed by Certain Parties and a Condemnation of the king's troops, fairly stated._ He sends it to the printer, but by the time it is published he has already left for the army.

His regiment is populated with colorful figures; the one called Barton is the surest shot with a musket, and insists upon wearing vibrant waistcoats. Matthew writes letters home to Miss Page, the silversmith's daughter, and signs them with a flourish. (The lady he courted in New York fled the city when her father died.) He finds that he is good at fighting, good at feeling bones break against the weight of his hands. It is a shock to him. He begs leave to deliver a letter to Mr Stark, a great trader important in the Congress.

It is on that forested road that the accident happens, deep in a wood that they say is cursed with Indian magics. Murdock is a modern man, and has no sympathy for superstition. Still, something begins that Friday morning as he falls from his horse and his eyes slacken and grow grey. For now he can see the hum of things, glimpse deep into the law of creation.

The streets of New York never seem the same.


End file.
